


Shared Like Stars

by blithers



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Bodyswap, Book: Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Dubious Consent, F/F, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Masturbation, Orgasm Denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:49:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23022763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: “Griddle?  Please tell me that’s you in there.”“Your body sucks,” Gideon said, by way of response.  “How do you do anything in this pile of bones?”“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the Reverend Daughter said, and slammed Gideon’s head back against the floor.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 143





	Shared Like Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my beta reader, Care. <3

It happened like this: one moment Gideon was swinging a sword, vision doubled-up and swimming, her Lady’s psyche riding her own like a recalcitrant mount, and the next moment Gideon found herself in an entirely different room, in an entirely different body, pressing a button down, piloting Harrowhark’s thin body as though it were her own.

Adrenaline and fear spiked through her system like a stim. She yanked her hand off the pedestal, flung open the door from Imaging to the Second Laboratory antechamber and saw her own form in the Response room, fighting for its life: sweating muscles and hair chopped short and flaming red, face paint ghoulishly slipping, the testing construct somehow still strung together with residual necrotic energy. Harrowhark held a sword in Gideon’s hand, pinched awkwardly between her fingers, and tripped backwards and slipped on the skree field of bone fragments, going down hard on a knee.

Gideon smashed the door open and dragged the Ninth Lady backwards as the skeleton beast finally evaporated, poof, like so much forgotten bone mist. Jagged chunks of osseous matter rained gently down around them; exanimate mass sunk down into the drains on the floor like the worst sort of fog.

They fell to the ground, panting, disassociating and disconnected.

“Griddle? Please tell me that’s you in there.”

“Your body sucks,” Gideon said, by way of response. “How do you do anything in this pile of bones?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the Reverend Daughter said, and slammed Gideon’s head back against the floor.

-

“We cannot tell anybody else about this.”

“I’m not _dumb_ ,” said Gideon.

Harrowhark gave her a condescending, snide little look which Gideon thought looked quite different when seen in her own face. It blunted the effect, somehow.

“Don’t talk to anybody,” Harrow continued, and Gideon could practically hear the capitalization and underlining: _DON’T TALK TO ANYBODY GIDEON NAV YOU DUMMY_. “They’ll know you’re not me as soon as you open your mouth.”

“Don’t try to hold a sword when you’re me,” Gideon said. “And… walk better. Than you do.”

Harrow attempted another withering look that fell short yet again.

“It’ll be right,” Harrow said, a bit stiffly. “I did this; I can undo it.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in your weakling little body, so, yeah. You better make it right, Nonagesimus.”

Gideon watched Harrow paint her face - Gideon’s face - to particularly dire effect, the skeletonized mask both better-defined and crueler-looking than Gideon usually managed. Harrowhark shoved Gideon’s dark-lensed aviators on, muttered “ridiculous, this is ridiculous,” and left for the Canaan House library.

And so Gideon loitered, unsure what to do, caged in a foreign body and too-familiar quarters. Dusk grew like a fungus; shadows from the landing port above stretched their emaciated fingers into the Ninth chambers. The night dripped around her. She forced Harrow’s borrowed body into a single chin up before the muscles completely gave out, shaking and overwhelmed, which was completely embarrassing, honestly.

Shit, Harrow was probably walking around in Gideon’s body right now, too busy obsessing over how to get her wimpy body back and salivating over ascending to Lyctorhood and other such boring necromantic pursuits to properly enjoy how awesome Gideon’s own body was. If Harrowhark had any sense she would savor being able to properly lift a sword for a time, maybe crush some pushups, garner up some of the sheer, wiped-out physical rightness that came from using your body in the way it was meant to be used.

The Ninth Lady’s body eventually let it be known that it had to pee. Gideon took a piss, a bit amused at the blessed Reverend Daughter having to pass water just like the rest of the lowly living. Hunger came next: Gideon thought it wise to be a good host, and took Harrowhark’s body to the dining area off the atrium and scowled in her most unwelcoming, Nonagesimus-y manner as she sat at a far table, daring company and sipping a bowl of thin broth with a flaky white meat and little green circles that tasted faintly of snow leek floating at the top.

Gideon slept in Harrowhark’s bed that night in a fit of rebellious spite. Harrow’s scent surrounded her like a fog, and Gideon dreamed restless and aching and strange things that she tried to forget in the morning.

-

Harrowhark had still not returned back to the Ninth chambers when Gideon awoke. Sunlight gamely attempted to stream through the glass windows and mostly failed, the awning of the spaceflight pad overhanging the dim room like the cap of a particularly giant and unhelpful mushroom. 

The dreams Gideon had had still sat uneasily in the back of her head, wanting and unnervingly possessive.

And so Gideon brushed Harrowhark’s teeth, touched up the paint the Ninth Lady wore as a shield, then proceeded to methodically strip off the dour Ninth House acolyte robes, undo the clasps of the rib cage corset, and unwind the stretchy medical band from around Harrow’s slim chest, so she could get a good old look-see at the body she was schlepping around.

She wondered, a bit abstractly, if she should feel guilty about sneaking a peek at the Reverend Daughter’s blessed bits and bobs, but: 1) She hated Harrow, right, she’d do it anyway just to spite Harrow’s holier-than-thou, so-pious-it-makes-you-want-to-hurl-chunks attitude, 2) Gideon had never had seen another person’s tits in the flesh that wasn’t some dirty picture and 100% deserved that experience at least once in her life, and 3) It was her body right now anyway, so fuck you, why not.

Gideon flapped the arms around a bit to reassure herself again that she was really the person driving, then took a deep breath and looked down. Harrow had barely any tits, but her nipples she did have were huge, dark things that stuck out awfully from her pale chest. Gideon has always been into bigger boobs; it was embarrassing the intensity of the interest she felt looking down at Harrow’s thin little bird’s chest and real-life, teenage-girl-sized tits.

Gideon reached up a hand and brushed it experimentally over one of Harrow’s nips and, shamefully, yelped. Harrow was working with way more sensitivity than Gideon felt when she played with her own tits. Fuck, Harrow didn’t even know how good she had it. It was just like so many things in her stupid life, really.

Spiked with a burst of resentment, Gideon viciously twisted one of Harrow’s dark nipples, and, joke’s on her, Harrow’s knees actually gave out underneath Gideon, smacking hard against the hard, tiled floor of the Ninth’s quarters. Gideon gasped.

The nipple was turning a dark red now, sort of used-looking and hard as a pebble. The feeling of it cut and danced underneath her skin.

Gideon really wanted to do the same thing to the other one.

The knob of the door behind Gideon rattled.

Dread and horror bloomed like ink in Gideon’s soul. If Harrow came back, and found her like this... Gideon jumped to her feet, jonesing bad for her sword, as a skeleton entered the room instead. A Canaan House servant, eerie and serenely blind to the drama standing like a naked, aroused dumb butt right in front of it, glided into the bathroom to gather dirty towels flung haphazardly on the floor.

“Fuck,” Gideon muttered, bare-chested in Harrow’s borrowed body, tits-out and feeling very exposed.

Okay, change of plan. Obviously doing... whatever she was doing... in the chambers she shared with Harrowhark, behind an unlocked door, was the action of a shit-for-brains, too-horny-to-make-it dumbfuck. Gideon wasn’t going to be caught out like this by Harrow; she’d never hear the nagging end of it. Gideon needed a locked room and a modicum of privacy, pronto.

She wrapped Harrow’s robes back around herself and waited until the bone servant had finished its work, then prudently locked herself into the newly cleaned bathroom.

The room was dim and dank, the tub antiseptic and bare. Decaying moss and tendrils of creeping plants hung in the recesses; black mold splotched the white tiling like clinging shadows. Gideon stripped Harrow’s robe and shirt off again and threw it on top of the sonic cleaner.

She wrapped her arms around Harrowhark’s upper body, feeling the ribs and shifting muscles of this physical thing she now inhabited. Harrow was a construct of bone and sinew, with translucent, vein-etched skin and basically zero strength. Gideon had never felt like more of a weenie in her entire life.

Gideon made Harrowhark’s body flex, two tickets to the gun show, so she could laugh at how embarrassing the result was: twin little snails perched on long white bones. Then she wretched Harrow’s other nipple and just about hit the goddamn ceiling.

She started to wonder if Harrow’s body was as sensitive in other, more interesting ways.

The idea felt revolutionary and dangerous: a bridge too far, as well as the obvious next step. Harrowhark lived her life as a gloomy-ass nun, running her fingers over rosaries of knucklebones rather than the living flesh of her own consecrated body. She was probably saving herself for the Emperor or some such shit. Harrow almost certainly thought the only sex worth having was as a virgin sacrifice to the living God she worshipped; sex as a thing to be suffered with noble purpose for religous reasons, gritting your teeth the whole time.

Gideon quadruple-checked the lock on the bathroom door, then stripped off Harrow’s long-trousers and utilitarian underwear.

Harrow’s hips were as thin and unattractively boney as her chest; the hair between her legs dark and unruly. There were thin scars criss-crossed along the skin of Harrowhark’s left upper thigh, scabbed and old and shocking in their regularity. Gideon averted her eyes from the scarring, feeling obscurely that in this one matter she should give Harrow, of all things, privacy.

The effect as a whole was rather boyish, not Gideon’s thing at all, who tended to linger over the great ladies of the magazines she had. Gideon was finding it increasingly hard to explain why she was so turned on by Harrow’s waifling body: the thrill of it being forbidden nipped at her, the same knife-sharp clarity and adrenaline she felt when fighting with Harrow. And the fact that this was _Harrow_ , of all people, _Harrowhark_ , Gideon Nav’s own necromancer and bane of her entire existence - well. _Well_.

Gideon skated fingers down Harrow’s flat stomach, and shivered.

-

Gideon could not remember the first time she had masterbated, the event lost to the shifting memories of youth. The depths of the Ninth House were agonizingly boring after all, a dying reliquary where religious monotony provided nothing in the way of stimulation for a growing child. Orgasm was a flash of light in the darkness: a resentful, inherently selfish little rebellion.

She would put reasonable odds on Harrow never having done the same, what with piloting her dead parents and plotting ways to ruin Gideon’s life and being generally insufferable all filling up the busy Harrowhark Nonagesimus My-Life-Really-Is-The-Worst social calendar. The idea of Harrow ever taking a spare five minutes to lock herself in the bathroom for a little personal slap-and-tickle was almost laughable, really.

Gideon clasped Harrow’s barely-there tits and dark nipples in her hands and squeezed them, more gently this time, letting the feeling build in her, like rising water in the dark. The Reverend Daughter’s body obligingly revved up to a full, thumming throttle all around her. 

Being horny in another person’s body was pretty goddamn weird. Gideon was the one actually panting for it, but Harrow’s physical body pulsed around her with the same blind want, a separate entity with the same desires. Mind and body, spirit and flesh, Gideon and Harrowhark both: inexorably bound together in dirty thoughts and deeds as they had always been in all sorts of other pettier, more annoying ways.

Gideon let a hand drift downward, and raked it casually through Harrow’s pubic hair and okay, yeah, yes, she was really going to do this.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the buffed steel mirror over the sink and startled at Harrowhawk’s wild expression looking back to her, the normally prim-as-fuck ferrety princess face transformed: thin lips parted, eyes black, the skeleton paint looking weirdly hot for the first time ever.

Gideon watched herself in the mirror as she brought one hand up to her Lady’s red and used nipple, dragging the pad of her thumb across it.

She slipped the other hand between Harrowhark’s thin thighs.

Harrow’s cunt was great; astonishingly great, really. Gideon would have been able to properly admire it if she hadn’t come down hard on her ass at the same time, and had to recline back and bend her wrist at an awkward angle to keep at it, running her fingers along Harrowhark’s soaked pussy, avoiding the clit, biting Harrow’s lip until she could taste the bright copper of familiar blood.

Gideon brought her fingers back to her mouth and lapped them up. Harrow’s cunt tasted sharp and thick and so good that Gideon moaned around the fingers.

She moved her hand back to the Reverend Daughter’s wet cunt and shoved two fingers, streaked with the red of blood from her lip, unceremonious and eager, inside Harrowhark’s body. The intrusion pinched and hurt; Harrow’s body was tight, too tight. Gideon relished the bite of the pain, the newness of feeling.

 _This is my own body, this is what I do to myself,_ Gideon thought wildly, her wrist bent awkwardly in the way she always masturbated, and the rightness of that feeling spread through her like honey, thick and sweet.

The necromancer’s body pulsed around her like a heartbeat, a vice holding Gideon’s consciousness captive. She reached her thumb up to brush Harrowhark’s clitoris, testing the sensation. Harrow’s body seized up and shivered at the touch, stomach muscles clenching down hard. Gideon fucked herself onto Harrowhark’s fingers, grinding a bit in her desperation, letting her clit continue to bump up against her thumb, holding it steady for her rocking body.

She reached up to flick one of Harrow’s nipples again, and her eyes just about rolled back in her head it was so good.

She could feel an orgasm starting to build, sweet and itchy and immense, just out of reach yet tantalizingly close. Gideon felt up Harrowhark’s tits a bit more, enjoying herself immensely now, and let her hands drift around Harrow’ sharp, feral little form before moving back down to circle Harrow’s aching clit again.

Impending release roiled through her like thunderstorm clouds on the horizon. And then, a hideously clear and sober thought struck Gideon, a sudden litany of all the things the body she was inhabiting had potentially never experienced: tiny moments of kindness, being a normal fucking human being, doing a single pushup without wanting to curl up and die. Orgasm.

 _Orgasm_.

Gideon didn’t know for sure, but the thought gave her pause.

Gideon ceased her motion against Harrowhark’s clit, blood pulsing underneath her now-steady fingertips. The looming orgasm clenched and held, shivering expectantly.

More flashes: Harrowhark ordering her shut in a cell in the depths of the Ninth House. The many deprivations and cruelties accumulated over a life lived under the blessed Reverend Daughter’s thumb. The last time Gideon had seen Harrow’s parents alive; the first time she had seen them dead. The punishing hunger, the relentless darkness, the religious penitence, the resentment and obsession, the hatred between them that Gideon sometimes understood but sometimes did not. The way Harrowhark watched her; the distaste and wariness and sharp emotion in her eyes. The way she sometimes stared too long when Gideon was pretty sure she did not mean to be caught.

The Reverend Daughter’s body begged; Gideon withheld. She took a deep breath in and removed her hand, angry and resentful and ashamed and confused.

Harrow’s nipples hurt in the open air, hard and puckered things that they were.

“Fuck,” Gideon whispered, and looked down at her fingers. Harrowhark’s fingers. Whatever. They were very faintly pink with what might be blood - residue from Harrow’s bleeding lip or something else, Gideon didn’t know.

“Fuck,” Gideon repeated, and stood up. “Fuckity fuck fuck.”

She dressed in a daze, body thrumming, the denied orgasm like the throb of a deep bruise inside of her. Gideon sat then on Harrowhark’s immense four-poster bed, hands crossed neatly in her lap, to await the arrival of her necromancer with desire in her heart and blood on her fingers.

-

“I have a plan,” Harrow said.

Harrowhark’s body still ached, hours later. There was a soreness between Gideon’s legs, despite Gideon cleaning Harrow with a damp cloth earlier, despite the fact that she had _stopped_. Harrow’s nipples were bonkers hard; the face paint shittily and hastily applied. Resentment and unresolved lust sat like a stone in Gideon’s gut.

Gideon had wondered as she waited if Harrow would know what she had done to her body, if they managed to switch back. If Harrow would be able to feel the little skittering edges of pending orgasm still sewn into the nerves of her body, the raw, resentful way Harrow’s nipples stood out from her body. The tenderness in her cunt. If Harrowhark would _know_ what Gideon had done, what Gideon had fantasized about. What Gideon had attempted, with clever fingers and the Reverend Daughter’s naked and willing form.

Harrowhawk paced the room restlessly, the movement familiar in an unfamiliar body. “I won’t bother trying to explain it to you, but know that it’s immensely clever and not one necromancer in a generation could have cracked this, and yet I solved it.”

Gideon rolled her eyes and tried to look cool about it. “Tell me more, oh great necromancer of mine.”

“We’ll do it now,” Harrow continued, right over Gideon. “If everybody keeps to their typical schedule, most should be out of the Laboratories.”

“Great. Sounds like creepy fun.”

And so they made their way back into the Second Laboratory to recreate the moment of transference: Harrowhark clenching the rapier like a lifeline she scarcely understood, Gideon ready to press a single button in an empty room like the contributor to success she definitely was.

Gideon sent up a brief, rare prayer to the Undying Necrolord Prime that Harrowhark was the hot shit she thought she was, that what they were about to attempt would, indeed, work. She ran an idle hand one more time across Harrowhark’s chest, a fond farewell to Harrow’s tits, which she was pretty sure she’d never in a thousand lifetimes get the opportunity to feel up again.

Gideon wondered, suddenly, her hand lingering on Harrowhark’s bound breasts, if Harrow had done anything similar with Gideon’s own body. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably as she considered this new scenario, her chest tightened with an immense emotion Gideon could find no name for. The images were both disturbing and exciting: Harrow’s hands touching her torso, running along her obliques and past her hips. Licking the salt sweat off from around Gideon’s wrist, up her arm, along the muscles. Harrow touching Gideon’s body, wherever Harrow might please.

Rainbow auras bloomed like oil in Gideon’s vision, intruding, and Harrowhark’s mind closed in around her own. Gideon hastily pushed aside the direction of her thoughts and dropped her hand back to her side, pathetically and desperately hoping that Harrow could not see this new secret of hers, hoping to keep it close and safe. Harrowhark’s presence in the back of her mind was familiar company from their previous work in the Second Laboratory, uncomfortably intimate, closer than anybody had ever been to Gideon before - yet unsatisfying and frustrating now, in a way Gideon immediately decided she should not think too closely about.

Gideon closed her eyes. There was a great shifting of the world around her, and when she opened her eyes again she was grasping a sword again, familiar and deadly, joy of all joys. Before her the great bone construct rose, rearing back to fight.

Gideon’s lips peeled back in a baring of teeth that was almost a smile.

And Gideon the Ninth went to work.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](https://blithers.tumblr.com/post/611991121986568192/shared-like-stars-blithers-the-locked-tomb) on tumblr!


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